Adventures in mutual credit

We want to build a payments ecosystem so that community currency entrepreneurs can pick up appropriate components and make them work together quickly thus concentrating their resources on developing their Unique Sales Proposition. We want marketplace entrepreneurs and community currencies to be able to choose between Ripple, OpenMoney, and Cyclos for their transaction storage, and to know that these choices will not prevent them from intertrading. They need to be able to re-use existing mobile payments apps rather than write their own.

Bitcoin may disintermediate banks, but that will not change the economy, save the environment or make society fairer. One peaceful way to prevent our governments driving us to collective suicide is to get behind a new generation of P2P credit projects.

Amalurra, Basque for 'mother earth', was formed from a meditation group with life-coach Irene Goikolea over 20 years ago. Wanting to take their practice further, they bought an old seminary and oriented their lives around making it beautiful and offering hospitality. Fast forward to now, and there are several gleaming buildings, including a hotel, hostel, spa, cafe, restaurant, many spaces for meetings and workshops, a sweat-lodge next to a stream and extensive gardens.

There's been much attention, in the alternative media at least, around Amir Taaki and the Dark Wallet project which aims to make using bitcoin more anonymous. Taaki argues, quite properly, that regulating Bitcoin is squandering the founder's legacy and neutering the opportunity that technology gives us to create a really free market.

Perched on one of the foothills of the Pyrenees, in the Basque region, Lakabe was a tiny deserted village of 7 houses re-inhabited 34 years ago by a handful idealists fleeing the city life. There was no road, and no rooves on the houses, very little money for redevelopment, and certainly no tenure. Now there are 50 people, a bakery, a sustainable pine forest, and the village is 'official' although the property can neither be bought by the residents nor sold by the local government.

I was getting so lost that that I had to step back for a few hours and create this map. It was extremely useful!

Money is so much more than a means of settling debt or a measure of your claim on the productive wealth of the rest of the world.

If we are to design alternatives to money we need to understand not only the classical functions but the secondary effects and meanings which are not always recognised. I just jot some of the following sentiments which might be expressed when I give money to someone.

Many Bitcoin devotees decry modern economics with its debt-for-money and laxative easing which serves entrenched and corrupt political power. They argue that a public blockchain and limited coin supply restores honesty to money, and hence economic justice.

Stephan Tual, CCO of Ethereum project, penned this helpful article outlining some of the possibilities of the new technology. I recommend you read it.

I have in my possession a 'banknote' with your name on it, but am unclear as to its meaning. The words "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five pounds" are followed by the image of your signature, which makes me think it is a contract between you, the signatory, and me, the current bearer. So I write in hope that you might clarify a few questions which arise in me.